Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Reflected In American And Chinese Disaster Movies

With the continuous development of globalization, the communication between each country and nation has become increasingly frequent. Because different ethnic groups have differences in such cultural factors as cognitive concepts, customs and habits, friendship and family relationship, film of different countries also convey different cultural concept. As an important part of movie, disaster movie first appeared at the beginning of20th century, and began to be popular in the1970s as a new type of style. The Day After Tomorrow and Super Typhoon can stand for typical disaster movies for America and China respectively. Predecessors have studied these two movies from different aspects, such as religion, reception aesthetics, translation, communication and character analysis, etc. And some others have studied them comparatively from philosophical and cultural perspectives. But no research has made to compare the two movies from the perspective of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Therefore, this paper will study the cultural phenomenon reflected in the Day after Tomorrow and Super Typhoon from the perspective of Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions and discuss the cultural differences and the causes of the differences.This paper consists of four chapters besides introduction and conclusion. Chapter one is literature review, briefly introducing differences between Chinese and American cultures and the definition of disaster movie. Chapter2is theoretical background, systematically analyzing the five cultural dimensions of Hofstede and their application. As the most important part of this paper, chapter three discusses how Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are reflected in American and Chinese disaster movies through the in-depth analysis of these two movies. It further examines the differences between the cultural dimensions reflected in movies and in life, and analyzes the deep reasons for the differences. Chapter four summaries the whole paper and points out that American and Chinese movie cultures have both differences and fusion.What a movie carries is culture. Through the deep analyses of the culture differences and culture integration revealed in the two movies, people can better understand the culture differences in life, which of course is helpful for the success of cross-culture communication.